DIA

The US Justice Department took the unprecedented step of charging five members of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with 31 criminal counts of hacking and cyber espionage against six American companies. That means they each get their own FBI wanted posters (see above and below). The announcement comes just days after Gen. Fang Fenghui, the PLA’s chief of the General Staff,…

The assessments of just what President Barack Obama is doing or might do to controversial surveillance programs run by the Pentagon’s NSA since his big Friday speech have been, one might say generously, uneven. Is Obama ending the bulk collection of telephone traffic metadata, or making minor changes? Is he signaling a landmark change in…

It’s easy to forget that it’s been less than a decade since the reorganization of the intelligence community as part of the post-9/11 handwringing that went on in Washington, but as the role the NSA and intelligence community gets another look following the Snowden disclosures, it’s worth considering how the current structure was cobbled together.…

[HTML1] In the defense sector, threats drive strategies, strategies (kind of) drive investments, and investments drive budgets. Theoretically, at least. Analysts expect very few parts of the U.S. defense budget to grow over the next decade. One portion expected to swell, however, is the military intelligence budget. And Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael…

UN weapons inspectors could soon begin the arduous and tense work of locating and seizing Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons. But the head of the Pentagon’s top intelligence organization wants everyone watching the Syria-US-Russia drama to know one thing: It’s going to take a long time to get those weapons out of the country.

A day after the Washington Post published selected parts of the—until now—secret National Intelligence Program budget summary from fiscal 2013, the Web site Cryptome.org did the paper on better, posting the entire 43 pages from Vol. 1 of the document, as opposed to the 17 pages the Post released. Aside from the $52 billion top…

(Photo: Defense Intelligence Agency) Every ambitious start-up needs a little seed money. That’s true for new businesses and clandestine military spy agencies. So be skeptical of breathless media accounts that dramatically state how Capitol Hill’s most pro-military committee is blocking the Defense Department’s plan to establish it’s very own spy agency. True, the House Armed…

It’s that time again: National defense authorization act season. (Just loosen your tie and take a deep breath, nervous defense wonk, Intercepts is mildly confident your program is going to survive. Probably.) Following long-held custom, the House Armed Services Committee kicks things off this week with a series of subcommittee mark ups as the panel…